In honor of his plea for the second coming of Henry Kissinger, Seymour Hersh has just been promoted to the position of new Grand Heresiarch of the Order of the Shrill. (The Shrill Blog, 125 links from 95 sources on Technorati, and growing daily!)
Seymour Hersh is not one of Henry Kissinger's favorite people, and the feeling appears to be mutual. That makes this quote from Hersh in Salon all that more delicious. (BTW, it's a great interview by Mary Jacoby covering Hersh's new book Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, which includes an expansion of his prior reporting on Abu Ghraib and new reporting on the widely-hailed at the time, but poorly executed, Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan.)
You're an expert on Henry Kissinger. Is there someone who ...So Hersh's answer to the puzzle praktike suggested a while back -- surely the smartest of these guys had to have a broader strategic agenda that wasn't so naive -- is "no, they really are true believers, which is why they're so uniquely dangerous."
I'm an expert on the side of Henry Kissinger that lied like most people breathed.
Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?
Oh, believe me, I pray for one [clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward]. Wouldn't it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn't believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that's moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There's no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They're like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.
The first afoe European weblog awards